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Tag: prevailing party

A personal injury firm’s (Goldberg, Weisman and Cairo) failure to properly document its attorney time records resulted in an almost 88% fee reduction after the defendants appealed from a real estate dispute bench trial verdict.

The plaintiffs – one of whom is a GWC attorney – in Kroot v. Chan, 2019 IL App (1st) 181392 sued the former property owners for violating Illinois Residential Real Property Disclosure Act, 765 ILCS 77/1 et. seq. (the Act) after they failed to disclose known property defects to the plaintiffs.

The trial court found for the plaintiffs on their Act claims and common law fraud claims and assessed nearly $70,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs against defendants. The defendants appealed citing the plaintiffs’ dearth of competent fee support.

Reversing, the First District emphasized how crucial it is for even a “contingent fee law firm” like GWC to sedulously document its attorney time and services.

Under Illinois law, a plaintiff seeking an attorney fee award had the burden of proving entitlement to fees. Additionally, an attorneys’ fee award must be based on facts admissible in evidence and cannot rest on speculation, conjecture or guess-work as to time spent on a given task.

Unless there is a contractual fee-shifting provision or a statute that provides for fees, an unsuccessful litigant is not responsible for the winner’s fees. And while the Act does provide a “hook” for attorneys’ fees, the common law fraud claim did not. As a result, the First District held that the fraud verdict against one defendant wasn’t properly subject to a fee petition.

“Reasonable attorneys’ fees” in the context of a fee-shifting statute (like the Act) denotes fees utilizing the prevailing market rate. The Act’s fee language differs from other statutes in that it provides that fees can be awarded to a winning party only where fees are incurred by that party. “Incurred,” in turn, means “to render liable or subject to” [⁋⁋ 11-12 citing Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 1146 (1981)]. As a consequence, unless attorneys’ fees have actually been incurred by a prevailing party, the trial court has no authority to award fees under the Act.

At the evidentiary hearing on plaintiff’s fee petition, three GWC attorneys admitted they didn’t enter contemporaneous timesheets during the litigation and that a document purportedly summarizing GWC’s attorney time was only an estimate. The lawyers also conceded that plaintiffs didn’t actually pay any legal fees to GWC. Still another attorney witness acknowledged she tried to reconstruct her time nearly 8 months after the underlying work was performed. [⁋ 19]

The appeals court noted the record was devoid of any evidence that (1) plaintiffs ever agreed to pay for legal services, (2) plaintiffs were ever billed for GWC’s legal services, (3) plaintiff ever paid for those services, or (4) that GWC expected plaintiffs’ to pay for its services. The court also found that the supporting affidavits submitted in support of the fee petition were inadmissible hearsay documents. (It’s not clear from my reading of the opinion why the affidavits and billing record did not get into evidence under the business records hearsay exception.)

In the end, the Court found the absence of either simultaneous time records or testimony that the attorney working on the matter had an independent recollection of the time and tasks incurred/performed rendered the fee petition too speculative.

Kroot provides a useful gloss on the governing standards that control when a plaintiff can recover attorneys’ fees. Aside from stressing the importance of making contemporaneous time records and offering proper supporting fee evidence, the case’s lesson is that in the context of a statute like the Act that only provides for fees actually incurred, the plaintiff must actually pay attorneys’ fees to merit a fee award. Since the evidence was that the prevailing plaintiffs never actually were billed or paid any fees to their attorneys, the plaintiffs’ lawyers failed to carry their burden of proof on the fees issue.

The court affirmed a $70k-plus fee award for the landlord even though its damages were reduced by $20k for failing to mitigate damages. Code Section 9-213.1 (of the Illinois eviction or forcible statute) obligates a suing lessor to mitigate its damages. This means the landlord can’t sit back while rent payments become due and pile up without making measurable efforts to re-rent the premises.

On the attorneys’ fees issue, the law in Illinois is that the unsuccessful party usually has to pay his own fees unless there is a contract provision regarding attorneys’ fees or an applicable statute allows for fees. In addition, a clearly worded fee-shifting clause should be enforced as written in favor of the prevailing party.

Q1: Who Is A Prevailing Party?

A: The one who is successful on a significant issue and achieves some benefit in bringing suit. But, a litigant doesn’t have to succeed on all claims to be considered a prevailing party.

Where a case involves multiple claims and both parties win and lose on different claims, it may be that neither side is the prevailing party.

Q2: What Does Fee Petitioner Have To Show?

A: The party petitioning for attorneys’ fees has the burden of presenting sufficient evidence to the trial court and a fee petition must specify (i) services performed, (ii) who performed them, (iii) time expended on the services, and (iv) the hourly rate charged by counsel;

Other fees factors for the trial court to consider include (a) skill and standing of attorneys, (b) nature of the case, (c) complexity of the issues, (d) importance of the case, and (e) degree of responsibility required to prosecute or defend a case.

A court considering a fee petition can also rely on its own experience.

¶¶ 72-74.

Here, the defendant lease assignee only prevailed on part of its failure to mitigate defense and didn’t file or win any counterclaims. An affirmative defense differs from a counterclaim in that the former seeks to defeat a plaintiff’s claim while the latter (counterclaim) seeks affirmative relief from the plaintiff. See ,e.g. Nadhir v. Salomon, 2011 IL App (1st) 110851, ¶¶34 – 38 (A “set-off” is a counterclaim; not an affirmative defense since the set-off defendant/counter-plaintiff seeks affirmative monetary relief against the plaintiff/counter-defendant.)

The court held that a $20,000 reduction off an over $80k money damage verdict isn’t enough of a damages cut to make the defendant a prevailing party on the mitigation issue. As a result, the trial court was within its discretion in awarding 80% of the plaintiff’s claimed fees. Since the trial court found that the plaintiff prevailed on approximately 80% of its case (based on the partial reduction for failure to mitigate), the court’s fee award of over $70K was upheld.

Afterwords:

The case gives a good refresher on fee-shifting factors an Illinois court considers as well as further refinement of who is/who isn’t a prevailing party in litigation.

An interesting question is what would have happened if the tenant filed a counterclaim (as opposed to affirmative defense) and was able to obtain a $20K damages reduction on a set-off theory. I don’t know if it would have made a difference here since $20K off a $80K money award likely isn’t big enough to merit “prevailing party” status.

In Illinois, attorneys’ fees can only be assessed against a property “owner” but only after a finding that its failure to pay was “without just cause or right.” 770 ILCS 60/17. Today’s post features a case from Utah, a place I’ve never practiced. I deemed the case post-worthy because it highlights a lien issue likely to recur in mechanics’ lien cases.

Under Utah’s Lien Act, a lien attaches to the value of services, labor, materials or equipment furnished or rented on an improvement or structure. It also allows a “successful party” to recover a “reasonableattorneys’ fee” which the court taxes as “costs” on the losing party. The Lien Act also allows the successful claimant to recover “costs” of preparing and recording the lien including reasonable attorneys’ fees incurred in preparing and recording the lien notice.

In gutting much of the lien amount, the Utah appeals court held that attorneys’ fees are normally only allowed by statute or contract. If a lien claimant could always augment his lien amount with his attorneys’ fees, the amount claimed would be a “moving target” (the amount would keep going up indefinitely) and so frustrate the Lien Act’s purposes. ¶¶ 25, 35, 42.

The court also noted that since a party has no obligation to pay an opposite side’s attorneys’ fees in a liencase unless that party has lost the case, fees, by definition, can’t be included in a lien amount. Otherwise, it would be tantamount to putting the proverbial “cart before the horse” by allowing a lien claimant to tack on (future) fees before he was deemed a successful party. ¶¶ 38-42.

Afterword:

A decision worth noting for its universal applicability. Since lien case fees are often substantial, it’s important to know what amounts can and can’t be included in a lien claim. As 2 Ton shows, a failure to lien for the proper amount can have unfortunate fiscal ramifications.